Rutherford Birchard Hayes was the 19th president of the United States from 1877 to 1881. A lawyer and staunch abolitionist, he had defended refugee slaves in court proceedings during the antebellum years. Hayes left a fledgling political career to join the Union Army as an officer. Hayes believed in meritocratic government and in equal treatment without regard to wealth, social standing or race.
About Rutherford B. Hayes in brief
Rutherford Birchard Hayes was the 19th president of the United States from 1877 to 1881. A lawyer and staunch abolitionist, he had defended refugee slaves in court proceedings during the antebellum years. Hayes left a fledgling political career to join the Union Army as an officer. After the war, he served in Congress from 1865 to 1867 as a Republican. He left Congress to run for governor of Ohio and was elected to two consecutive terms, from 1868 to 1872. In 1876, the Electoral College made Hayes president in one of the most contentious elections in U.S. history. He won through the Compromise of 1877 that officially ended Reconstruction by allowing the restoration of white supremacy in the South. Hayes believed in meritocratic government and in equal treatment without regard to wealth, social standing or race. He vetoed the Bland–Allison Act of 1878, which put silver money into circulation and raised nominal prices, insisting that maintenance of the gold standard was essential to economic recovery. Hayes’s policy toward western Indians anticipated the assimilationist program of the Dawes Act of1887. Hayes retired to his home in Ohio, and became an advocate of social and educational reform. He died in 1881 and was succeeded by his son Rutherford Hayes, Jr. Hayes was born in Delaware, Ohio, on October 4, 1822, to Rutherford Hayes Jr. and Sophia Birchard. His father, a Vermont storekeeper, had taken the family to Ohio in 1817, and died ten weeks before Rutherford’s birth.
He was always close to Hayes and became a father figure to him, contributing to his early education. Hayes’ great-grandfather Ezekiel Hayes was a militia captain in Connecticut in the American Revolutionary War, but Ezekiel’s son left his Branford home during the war for the relative peace of Vermont. His earliest immigrant ancestor came to Connecticut from Scotland in 1625. Most of Hayes’s close relatives outside Ohio continued to live there. His first cousin, Mary Jane Mead, was the mother of sculptor John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of Oneida Community Community, and William Humphrey Mead, the first architect of Webb Goldsmith. Hayes did well at school and transferred to the Webb Webb preparatory school in Middletown, Connecticut, where he studied Latin and Ancient Greek. He later attended Ohio University and taught at Kenyon College in Ohio. Hayes died in 1896 and was buried at the Norwalk Seminary in Norwalk, Ohio. He is survived by his wife, Fanny, and their four children, all of whom survived to adulthood. Hayes is buried in Mount Vernon, Ohio; he also had a son, Rutherford Hayes Hayes, III, who died in 1936. Hayes also had two daughters, Mary Ann Hayes, and Mary Anne Hayes, a daughter-in-law, and a granddaughter, Mary Elizabeth Hayes, who was also a first cousin of John Noye Mead, who later became a sculptor.
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